Meta's Muse AI agent app reached number one on the US Apple App Store after launching September 8, 2026, with over 83,000 iOS downloads in two

The post Meta’s AI agent app Muse hits number two on the US Apple App Store appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Rising tensions in the Strait of Hormuz could destabilize global energy markets and increase the likelihood of broader military conflict.

The post Ships attacked in Strait of Hormuz as Trump weighs military response appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Qureshi's proposal to end Zcash's development fund by 2028 aims to prevent institutionalization, ensuring technical focus and finite governance.

The post Dragonfly’s Qureshi calls for Zcash development fund to end around 2028 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Xi's delegation could reshape US-China economic ties, potentially easing tariffs and fostering investment, impacting global markets and supply chains.

The post Xi Jinping reportedly assembling US business delegation including BYD, CATL, and Xiaomi appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Increased options trading and stock rallies suggest growing investor confidence in tech, potentially stabilizing market volatility.

The post Intel options trading surges as stock rallies, Cboe volatility drops appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Dan Hillery: Digital Credit Could Rival BTC’s $1.5 Trillion Market Cap

Two years ago, Bitcoin-backed digital credit barely existed. Today it’s a roughly $16 billion market and Dan Hillery of UXTO thinks the financialization layer on top of Bitcoin could one day rival the network itself. In the debut episode of The Allocators Edge, Hillery breaks down how variable-rate preferred securities like STRC and SATA are priced, why buybacks keep them anchored near $100 par, and what separates digital credit risk from digital equity risk. He also walks through the structured credit fund he’s building, including its senior and junior tranches.

0:00 — Digital Credit Is the Fastest-Growing Part of Bitcoin’s Capital Structure
1:18 — Why STRC’s Variable Rate Design Has No Precedent in Market History
2:59 — What Flat or Falling Bitcoin Prices Mean for Strategy and Strive
4:17 — Short-Duration Bitcoin-Backed Notes and the Next Five Years of Products
5:45 — The Biggest Misconceptions Investors Have About Preferred Securities
6:58 — How Buybacks and Capital Markets Activity Anchor STRC Near $100 Par
8:09 — Why Major Fund Classes Still Can’t Touch Digital Credit Today
9:10 — Inside the UXTO Credit Fund: Senior and Junior Tranche Structure
10:35 — Where the Leverage Comes From and How Volatility Risk Gets Transferred
11:50 — Liquidity, Redemptions, and Digital Credit in a 60/40 Portfolio

This video is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investments in digital assets involve significant risk and may result in loss of capital. Both UTXO Management and BTC Inc., producer of BMTV, are owned by Nakamoto Inc. (NASDAQ: NAKA)

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post Dan Hillery: Digital Credit Could Rival BTC’s $1.5 Trillion Market Cap first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Treasury Sanctions Iranian Crypto Exchange BitBank Over Bitcoin Transfers to IRGC

The U.S. is continuing to target Iran’s use of bitcoin. 

In a Thursday statement, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated BitBank, an Iranian crypto exchange, as part of Operation Economic Outcast — the Trump Administration’s whole-of-government economic campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its enablers. 

The U.S. has sanctioned Iran for decades. This year, the Middle Eastern country has stepped up its use of cryptocurrencies — including bitcoin — in order to skirt around economic penalties. 

“Today’s designations of Iranian digital asset infrastructure make perfectly clear that efforts to finance the Iranian regime using cryptocurrencies are not beyond OFAC’s reach,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said in a statement. 

“If you support the Iranian regime, the Department of the Treasury will sanction you.”

The sanctions target designated Iranian financier Babak Zanjani, along with its software developer, Pishtaz Simorgh Electronic Trade Company, and three of Zanjani’s associates: Hossein Ali Zaker Hossein, Mohammad Mahdi Zaker Hossein, and Seyed Adel Heidari.

Since June, the Iranian Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority has used BitBank to move bitcoin to the Iranian regime, according to the Treasury. 

Thursday’s sanctions aim to hit the “architecture Zanjani built to launder funds,” it added. 

“The Department of the Treasury will continue to not only target the Iranian digital asset ecosystem, but also international entities and actors which help facilitate it,” the statement continued. 

Iran started a bitcoin-backed insurance service for its counties shipping companies earlier this year.

The U.S. in July said that it had frozen crypto linked to the Iranian regime, mostly in the form of Tether’s stablecoin. 

Stablecoins like Tether’s USDT can be frozen by the company that issues the asset. But bitcoin, being decentralized and having no single issuer, cannot. 

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in July said Iran had been dodging sanctions by accepting pay in bitcoin from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. 

OFAC said at the time that Hormuz Safe, developed by Iran’s Ministry of Economy, “accepts payment in Bitcoin and other digital assets” so it can bypass sanctions. 

This post Treasury Sanctions Iranian Crypto Exchange BitBank Over Bitcoin Transfers to IRGC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Unlikely To Be Bothered by Interest Rate Hike: Grayscale

The Federal Reserve hiked interest rates for the first time since 2023 on Wednesday and it sent the bitcoin price — briefly — all over the place. 

But then it settled and currently sits a modest 1% higher over a 24-hour period. 

And according to asset manager Grayscale’s crypto research team, bitcoin is unlikely to be bothered by the Fed’s decision. 

“We believe yesterday’s move was a mid-cycle adjustment, not a cyclical change,” wrote the firm’s head of research, Zach Pandl, in a Thursday note. 

“And we doubt the one or two rate hikes expected for 2026 will lead to much change in capital allocation.”

Bitcoin has — in the past but not always — done well in a low interest rate environment. And when the Federal Reserve has in the past increased borrowing costs, the price of the leading digital asset has slid. 

That’s because low interest rates means more liquidity for investors to take risks and buy assets like bitcoin. 

Pandl added that when the Fed in 2022 started ramping up interest rates to contain inflation, it “probably weighed on the price of bitcoin” because it “meaningfully affected the opportunity cost of holding non-interest-bearing assets.” 

But this time feels more like 1997, argued Pandl, when the Federal Reserve did a one off hike and the Nasdaq kept moving higher.

Bitcoin’s price recently stood at close to $76,581, up 18% over the past 30 days. The coin  in August benefited from news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations.

The U.S. is currently in the grips of an affordability crisis and inflation is hurting households as oil prices surge. 

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh said the central bank was focused on bringing down inflation. 

“The plain fact is that inflation is too high, and has been for too long,” he said on Wednesday. 

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he wants interest rates to be lower. Writing on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, he said: “Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World — BY FAR.”

This post Bitcoin Price Unlikely To Be Bothered by Interest Rate Hike: Grayscale first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin ETFs Could Triple Gold Counterparts as Asset Matures: Expert

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds could be three times bigger than their gold counterparts as younger investors grow up, an ETF expert has said. 

Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine TV on Thursday, Bloomberg senior ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas, said that while bitcoin’s price is currently volatile, things would change in the future. 

Bitcoin ETFs debuted in 2024 after a decade of denials from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The ETFs had the most successful launch in the history of the products and currently manage nearly $100 billion in assets, according to Coinglass data. 

“I do believe the Bitcoin ETFs will triple gold in assets,” said Balchunas. 

“I always say Bitcoin is like gold as a teenager — you know, gold is 5,000 years old, it was mentioned 450 times in the Bible. I mean that’s old, and Bitcoin is 17 years old.” 

Balchunas went on to say that younger generations could end up being drawn to Bitcoin as the government continues to spend wildly and things become to expensive. 

He said that right now, Generation Z is rebelling against government deficits and inflation by voting for socialist politicians, but Bitcoin might be a better bet — because the government can’t confiscate it. 

One of Bitcoin’s selling points is its censorship resistance but investors appear to be more focused on buying the asset as a way of hedging against currency debasement. 

The so-called debasement trade was hot last year and is becoming popular again in 2026 as investors buy non-yielding assets like gold and bitcoin while the dollar becomes weaker. 

Balchunas added that as bitcoin’s price becomes less volatile, big institutions will be more interested in buying the asset as a store of value. 

Bitcoin in 2025 has its least volatile year in its short history. 

“As that volatility and correlation get closer to gold — look out,” he said. 

“I think that’s when you have the inflection moment where even the big institutions are like, okay, it’s finally ready for me to use as a sort of reliable store of value, possibly even a safe haven and an alternative.”

This post Bitcoin ETFs Could Triple Gold Counterparts as Asset Matures: Expert first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

SEC Green Lights Tokenized Stock Trading Despite Clarity Act Fail

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has approved tokenized stocks trading in a move indicating that the regulator will push ahead with rulemaking despite the Clarity Act not moving forward. 

Wall Street’s top regulator said Thursday that it was offering a five-year exemption to platforms that facilitate trading of tokenized stocks. Major crypto companies have long wanted to get such assets on the blockchain. 

Lawmakers blocked the Clarity Act in a procedural vote on Tuesday. Regulators had said before the vote that regardless of whether the landmark legislation passed, they’d still start regulating the crypto industry. 

“Congress was unsuccessful in advancing the Clarity Act despite the tireless efforts of many,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said in a statement. 

“So today, the Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a significant step forward, within its statutory authority, to bring America’s capital markets into the digital age by facilitating onchain trading of certain tokenized stocks.”

Jamie Selway, Director of the SEC Division of Trading and Markets, added: “Today’s approval of exemptive relief for on-chain secondary trading on a TSV–known as the ‘Innovation Exemption’–marks an important milestone for the Commission’s work to open our capital markets for tokenized securities.”

The SEC’s move is the latest by regulators pushing ahead despite major crypto legislation stalling. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig on Wednesday said that the top regulator would use its powers to advance crypto legislation despite the Clarity Act being blocked. 

The Clarity Act aims to formally divide oversight between regulators, distinguishing which digital assets are securities, commodities or stablecoins. 

President Donald Trump last month urged lawmakers to pass it but senators mostly voted against advancing the legislation — 49 for and 50 against — that the digital asset industry has long called for.  

Republicans for months have accused Democrats of deliberately holding back the bill. Some lawmakers had issues with Trump’s family making money from crypto ventures. Trump and the White House have always denied any conflicts of interest. 

This post SEC Green Lights Tokenized Stock Trading Despite Clarity Act Fail first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

State-linked hackers are increasingly using public blockchains to keep malware connected to infrastructure that traditional takedowns cannot easily disable.

Groups tied to North Korea and Iran accounted for roughly two-thirds of newly observed blockchain-dead-drop activity each quarter by the second quarter of 2026, Chainalysis said. State-linked operators now represent about half of all activity the analytics firm tracks, up from a negligible share in early 2024.

The technique, known as a blockchain dead drop, stores malware instructions, command-and-control addresses or pointers inside transactions and smart contracts. Compromised devices can repeatedly query those public records for updated instructions, letting attackers change servers without reinfecting victims.

Chainalysis said malicious blockchain writes rose from 2.06 a day to 11.1 after the emergence of high-capacity open-weight Chinese artificial-intelligence models, a 440% increase in less than a year.

The firm said those models lowered the expertise required to build the infrastructure, though its measurement does not identify a single model or establish that AI alone caused the increase.

The shift adds another security challenge for crypto companies, developers and enterprises that increasingly rely on public chains for legitimate applications. Blocking access to an entire network would also disrupt wallets, decentralized-finance platforms and other services using the same infrastructure.

North Korea adds cross-chain redundancy

North Korean-linked operators are already showing how blockchain infrastructure can make a malware campaign more resilient after defenders identify its components.

Chainalysis connected the threat group UNC5342 to a previously unattributed setup that uses TRON and Aptos as redundant routes into BNB Smart Chain. Encoded pointers on the first two networks direct infected devices toward malware instructions stored on BSC. The malware queries TRON first and switches to Aptos if that route fails.

Attackers can rotate their off-chain infrastructure by posting another transaction, after which previously infected machines automatically retrieve the updated location. Chainalysis said disrupting the operation would require action across all three chains at the same time.

Google Threat Intelligence began tracking UNC5342 in February 2025, when it used blockchain-based malware delivery in fake-job campaigns aimed at cryptocurrency and technology developers. The group used smart contracts to help deliver credential-stealing malware targeting browser data, passwords, and crypto wallets.

The approach extends a tactic attackers adopted after conventional hosting providers began shutting down malicious infrastructure. EtherHiding campaigns appeared on EVM-compatible networks in 2023 after operators shifted code into smart contracts that could remain accessible even when websites or servers were removed.

Iran-linked operators have taken a different route. Chainalysis said suspected actors connected to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence have embedded command-and-control routing information inside Bitcoin transactions sent to a well-known address historically associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. The address itself has no connection to the attackers and functions as a permanent public reference point for infected machines.

AI lowers the barrier for smaller operators

The same techniques are spreading beyond state-backed groups as artificial-intelligence coding tools reduce the specialist knowledge once required to build blockchain-based command infrastructure.

Chainalysis said it now tracks blockchain-dead-drop activity across five major networks and more than a dozen named malware strains. Russian-language criminal groups have also deployed smart contracts on Polygon as command resolvers, with infrastructure marketed to other operators through a malware-as-a-service model.

That creates a path for attackers to rent blockchain-based infrastructure rather than design it themselves.

In one operation, Chainalysis identified a primary wallet controlling multiple resolver contracts, with individual contracts apparently serving separate customers or campaign variants. Related addresses were also linked to fraudulent tokens and clipboard-hijacking campaigns targeting crypto users.

The economics favor continued adoption. Posting small amounts of data on public chains can be inexpensive, while the underlying record remains globally available and hard to remove. Attackers can then keep most of the actual compromise off-chain, using the ledger primarily to tell infected machines where to connect next.

Defenders shift from takedowns to surveillance

The permanence that gives attackers resilience also leaves a record that cybersecurity teams can monitor.

Every transaction used to rotate infrastructure remains timestamped and publicly visible. Chainalysis said defenders can map operator wallets, resolver contracts, funding relationships, and update histories, potentially linking campaigns that would appear unrelated when viewed only through their domains or servers.

Organizations can also monitor outbound JSON-RPC requests, the calls software uses to query blockchain nodes, for signs that infected machines are contacting suspicious contracts or addresses. Centralized API providers and RPC gateways remain potential intervention points even when the underlying blockchain cannot be taken offline.

Protocol developers have limited options to remove the underlying capability without restricting legitimate blockchain use. Chainalysis said preventing arbitrary data from being written on-chain would require changes with consequences that could outweigh the security benefit.

That leaves exchanges, infrastructure providers and cybersecurity firms with a growing monitoring problem. As more malware treats public chains as persistent coordination layers, defenders will need to follow activity across wallets, contracts and multiple networks while preserving access for legitimate users.

The next pressure point is likely to fall on RPC and API providers sitting between infected devices and blockchains. Their ability to identify and block malicious queries without disrupting ordinary applications could determine how much of the attackers' new resilience survives once the technique becomes more widely tracked.

The post Blockchain malware activity jumps 440% as AI lowers the barrier for North Korea and Iran-linked hackers appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Seven Democratic senators said Sept. 16 that CLARITY's failed Senate vote was not the end. The crypto market-structure bill fell short 49-50 the previous day on a procedural motion that needed 60 votes to advance.

Getting from that statement to a law now depends on a compressed legislative calendar, still-unresolved policy disputes, and a House of Representatives that would need to accept whatever the Senate eventually produces.

Even if all seven signatories switched from “No” to “Yes,” the count would move from 49 to 56, four short of 60. Adding North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis, whose “no” vote was a procedural move preserving his ability to bring the measure back for reconsideration, would push the total to 57, still three votes shy.

The statement shows real political will to keep negotiating, but it falls far short of describing a coalition capable of clearing the floor.

Getting CLARITY passed requires clearing several separate gates

Tillis's procedural “No” gives Senate leadership a live vehicle to bring CLARITY back. From there, the Senate would first need 60 votes to formally proceed to the bill, a step distinct from passing it.

Once CLARITY is on the floor, leadership must decide whether the negotiated text stays locked or opens to floor amendments, since ethics, stablecoin, and consumer-protection language could all be rewritten during that window.

Opponents can then mount a second filibuster against the underlying bill itself, meaning supporters may need 60 votes twice over before a simple majority can finally pass it.

Passage in the Senate would still leave the House needing to accept that text or negotiate a reconciled version, since both chambers must approve identical language before it ever reaches the president's desk.

A state work period runs from Oct. 5 through Nov. 6, leaving only the days before that recess for an immediate attempt to pass CLARITY, and no confirmed agreement exists to fill that window yet.

The chamber returns for a stretch from Nov. 9 through roughly Nov. 20, competing directly against nominations, appropriations, defense authorization, and tax legislation for scarce floor time.

A Thanksgiving break follows before a final push toward the Senate's Dec. 18 target for adjournment, a soft internal marker well short of a hard legal cutoff, since the current Congress technically runs into early January 2027.

Any Senate action inside that final stretch would still need to reach the House with enough time left for identical text to clear both chambers before the session effectively winds down.

What a workable deal has to resolve

Republican sponsors say their latest draft folds in 126 changes Democrats requested, including new ethics restrictions tied to presidential crypto holdings and a Treasury mechanism meant to respond to stablecoin-related deposit flight.

Democratic negotiators, including Mark Warner and Ruben Gallego, have continued flagging unresolved objections specifically about President Donald Trump's crypto interests. The ethics language exists but has not yet satisfied the senators whose votes matter most.

Banking associations separately argue the Treasury backstop responds only after harmful deposit flight has already occurred, and are pushing for tighter limits on the underlying stablecoin rewards themselves.

A July statement from Democratic negotiators also flagged consumer protection, illicit finance and market-integrity provisions as insufficient, and nothing in the September statement specifies which of those objections have since been resolved.

If Congress cannot finish this in 2026, federal regulators can still fill parts of the CLARITY gap through existing rulemaking authority. That kind of agency action is far less permanent than a statute passed by Congress, and other jurisdictions are moving ahead regardless.

The European Union's transition period for crypto-asset service providers under MiCA ran through July 1, giving European firms a completed framework while the American process remains open-ended.

The window is closing quickly

The bull case has a revised ethics and stablecoin agreement landing before the Oct. 5 recess, locking in the seven signatories, Tillis and several additional senators at once.

Under that path, Senate leadership can schedule reconsideration either just before the break or immediately upon return in November.

CLARITY's remaining test becomes a House execution problem well beyond a Senate vote-counting one, since the chamber would then need to move quickly on whatever the Senate sends over.

The bear case has negotiations still unsettled when the Senate returns Nov. 9, with ethics and stablecoin language remaining the sticking points while floor time gets consumed by other must-pass legislation.

In that scenario, any eventual Senate agreement arrives too close to the Dec. 18 target for the House to act on identical language in time, and CLARITY carries into the next Congress as an unfinished project well short of a completed law.

The clearest signs that CLARITY is moving again will be a public revision to the text, a named coalition of senators beyond the current seven, and a scheduled reconsideration or cloture vote.
A House willing to act on whatever the Senate eventually sends its way would complete the picture.

The post CLARITY Act needs 3 more senators and a race against the clock for a 2026 revival appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The Federal Reserve raised its target range by 25 basis points to 3.75%-4.00% on Sept. 16, pushing the one-year Treasury yield to 4.45% the same day and pressuring crypto lending yields.

That move lifts the return available to anyone willing to hold nothing riskier than government debt, setting a fresh benchmark for crypto lending yields to measure against.

Coin Metrics found that USDC lenders on Aave earned an average of 31 basis points less than that one-year Treasury throughout the period it studied in 2026. The Aave yield fell short of the Treasury rate in 78% of the intervals measured across that same window.

That gap predates the Fed decision, and the more useful question is what a Fed hike does to the calculation from here.

Treasuries and on-chain rates measure two different things

Anthony DeMartino, co-founder and CEO of Sentora, points to CDOR as the better lever for judging on-chain credit.

Sentora helped build that benchmark, which tracks overnight borrowing rates on USDC and USDT inside Aave V3, the largest decentralized credit market.

DeMartino told CryptoSlate:

“Correlation between SOFR and CDOR has been very low, so a Fed hike should not be expected to pull onchain rates materially higher, and SOFR is the wrong anchor for pricing onchain exposure.”

That argument works alongside the Treasury comparison, adding a second lens without replacing it.

The one-year Treasury measures what an investor gives up by choosing crypto lending over the safest available alternative, while CDOR measures what borrowing dollars inside Aave costs on any given day.

A useful accounting of crypto yield needs both figures, since a return that clears CDOR but misses the Treasury rate has still failed the more basic opportunity-cost test.

What the numbers show about the crypto premium

A European Central Bank working paper published Sept. 14 found that monetary-policy transmission into DeFi stablecoin deposit rates is weak and unstable in the short term.

Rates can even move in the opposite direction from Fed policy entirely before converging over a longer horizon, and deleveraging in crypto markets often drives that short-run divergence more directly.

Borrowers unwind positions and reduce the organic demand that sets on-chain borrowing costs.

Coin Metrics data shows where that premium currently stands. Aave's USDC yield trailed the one-year Treasury by 31 basis points on average, while Morpho's median USDC vault beat the same Treasury benchmark by 65 basis points, but carried roughly 3.3 times the annualized volatility of the Aave figure.

DeMartino noted:

“The premium over CDOR is where smart contract, liquidity, and credit risk are compensated, but there is no standard rate that can be applied here.”

In his account, the fair premium depends entirely on the specific protocols, curators, and assets an investor is exposed to.

As a purely analytical exercise, a plain stablecoin vault might reasonably need to clear the higher of the Treasury rate or CDOR plus another 100 to 300 basis points. Curated or leveraged strategies would need 300 to 600 basis points above that same floor.

That range mainly shows why a 4.1% yield can look inadequate against 4.45% Treasuries, while even a 5.1% crypto yield can remain debatable once volatility and tail risk enter the picture.

Turning abstraction into real numbers

Kraken's newly launched xStocks Vaults let investors keep exposure to tokenized equities like SPYx, QQQx or NVDAx while the vault borrows stablecoins against that collateral and deploys the proceeds into DeFi reward strategies.

Returns convert back into the same token and compound automatically. Kraken currently advertises a 2% net annualized yield for SPYx and QQQx and 1.8% for NVDAx, already net of a 25% performance fee, with withdrawals taking three days and potentially longer under stress.

On a $10,000 SPYx position, that 2% yield works out to roughly $200 of additional annual reward, entirely separate from whatever the underlying stock itself does.

DeMartino explained that if the stock sells off, the smart contract automatically repays debt to keep the position from being liquidated. If the market rallies, it takes on more debt to preserve the yield.

A 2% loss specific to the crypto vault's strategy would erase that entire year's incremental return. A decline in SPYx's price is a separate risk any equity token holder would face regardless of the vault, and keeping those two loss sources distinct is key.

Whether crypto's rate cycle pays off or gets caught by the Fed's

The bull case has organic borrowing demand, still concentrated almost entirely in BTC by DeMartino's account, staying strong enough that CDOR climbs on its own utilization independent of anything the Fed does.

Under that path, crypto lending yields can clear Treasuries through genuine on-chain demand, giving DeMartino's argument that crypto runs its own rate cycle real support in the data itself, beyond just commentary.

The bear case has higher-for-longer Fed policy eventually cooling risk appetite broadly, weakening crypto activity and pushing borrowers to deleverage.

In that scenario, the ECB's mechanism becomes the dominant force, with stablecoin deposit rates falling even as Treasuries stay elevated. Automated tools like Kraken's margin management prevent liquidations but compress the yield investors collect, and crypto lending ends up paying less when the safe alternative sitting right next to it pays more.

Crypto yield products are already easy to access, though the harder question is whether that yield compensates for the risk sitting underneath it. No single benchmark, CDOR or Treasury alike, fully answers that.

The post Why risk a smart contract exploit when safe US Treasuries pay better crypto yields? appeared first on CryptoSlate.

S&P Global has agreed to acquire smart contract security company OpenZeppelin in a transaction that would put the crypto company inside the group that includes S&P Global Ratings.

The transaction remains subject to closing conditions, S&P Global's announcement said. Financial terms were not disclosed, and S&P said it does not expect the deal to materially affect its financial results.

Future Contracts versions will also stay open source, and OpenZeppelin extended that commitment to its other open-source applications and tools.

OpenZeppelin says more than $37 trillion in value has been transferred through its Contracts software since 2015.

The current OpenZeppelin Contracts repository uses the MIT License, which grants broad rights to use, copy, modify, and distribute the software. Separately, OpenZeppelin said released versions will remain open source permanently and cannot be withdrawn.

S&P says OpenZeppelin would keep its name and operate as its own business unit after closing. Demian Brener would continue leading the company and report to Yann Le Pallec, president of S&P Global Ratings.

OpenZeppelin also said its security audits, engineering work and ecosystem programs will continue with the same team. The announced change is access to S&P's research capacity, market data, institutional reach and additional resources.

That would add smart contract security expertise to S&P's institutional risk and data operations without changing the public availability of OpenZeppelin's code.

OpenZeppelin's current terms of service permit certain changes to paid or hosted plans, including pricing, features, quotas and usage limits, with protections and notice depending on the type of change.

For customers, the announcement makes specific continuity promises about audits, engineering work, ecosystem programs and open-source code. It does not make the same promise about every price, product feature or usage limit.

Until closing, OpenZeppelin remains the subject of a pending acquisition agreement, not an S&P business unit. If the deal closes as announced, the main change for users would be corporate ownership and access to S&P's data, research, and institutional distribution, while OpenZeppelin says its public code and core client work will continue.

The post Wall Street gains direct oversight of Web3 security as S&P Global buys OpenZeppelin appeared first on CryptoSlate.

HP Wolf Security, the company's threat-research team, said a fake AI crypto-trading assistant distributed malware that could replace browser crypto wallet extensions on an infected Windows computer and turn the familiar wallet interface into a credential trap.

The campaign appeared in HP's September threat report, published Sept. 17 and based on threats observed from April through June 2026. HP described a compromise that began on a user's endpoint after a counterfeit trading tool was downloaded and run, not a breach of Coinbase, MetaMask, or their official extensions.

Malwarebytes had documented the TradingClaw campaign in April and found that Needle Stealer also circulated through other malware loaders. The fake AI assistant was one route into a broader malware operation.

Attackers promoted tradingclaw[.]pro as an AI assistant that could follow a personalized strategy and trade around the clock, according to the full HP report. Search-engine poisoning and paid advertisements directed prospective victims to a ZIP file presented as the software's installer.

The archive contained an executable named Trading Agent.exe and a DLL named iviewers.dll. HP identified the executable as OLEView, Microsoft's legitimate, digitally signed OLE/COM Object Viewer. HP said the signed program helped bypass Microsoft's SmartScreen reputation check, while the malicious payload remained in the accompanying DLL.

Running the trusted-looking program caused it to load that DLL. The code then decrypted Needle Stealer and used process hollowing, a technique that runs malicious code inside a newly launched legitimate process.

How the crypto wallet swap worked

Needle Stealer enumerated Chromium browser extensions and checked their 32-character IDs against a hardcoded list covering Phantom, Trust Wallet, Atomic Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, OKX Wallet, MetaMask, and Tonkeeper.

When it found a target, the malware shut down the browser and extracted a corresponding malicious extension into the existing extension folder.

On its first launch, the replacement connected to a command-and-control server used by the attacker and loaded backup domains. HP said the attackers had built realistic login screens, and a crypto wallet ID and password entered into a counterfeit interface could be sent to the operator.

MetaMask's guidance says that, for crypto wallets created with a Secret Recovery Phrase, the password unlocks MetaMask locally and cannot restore the wallet elsewhere. Even so, the substituted extension was operating on an already compromised device, leaving locally accessible funds at risk.

Neither HP's report nor its newsroom summary disclosed a campaign-wide victim count or aggregate crypto-loss figure, leaving the operation's scale unknown.

The post Fake AI crypto software is secretly replacing browser wallet extensions appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum spent most of this year looking like the coin everybody had given up on. Then one candle in August changed the entire picture, and ETH has been quietly building a launchpad ever since. The $3,000 level is no longer a fantasy number. It is roughly 19% away, and the chart is doing exactly what it needs to do to get there.

Where Is the ETH Price Right Now?

$Ethereum is trading at $2,510 on the daily, up 2.65% on the session, after opening at $2,445 and tagging $2,518 intraday. The low of the day was $2,435, which is the important part, because that is the third time in a month buyers have shown up in that exact zone.

Step back and the year looks brutal. ETH ground sideways through April near $2,400, rolled over in May, and collapsed through June into a low around $1,550. That is a drawdown of more than 65% from the August 2025 all-time high near $4,946. July was a slow repair job above $1,600. August was a boring drift between $1,900 and $2,050.

Then came the candle. In mid-August, Ethereum went vertical in a single daily session, ripping from roughly $1,950 through $2,000, through the 200 EMA, through $2,400, and closing near $2,500. That is a 28% expansion move in one bar, and it did not retrace. Everything since has been consolidation, not distribution.

What Does the ETH Chart Say About $3,000?

The structure right now is a textbook range. $2,400 is the floor. $2,600 is the ceiling. Ethereum has been locked between them for a full month, and neither side has broken.

That matters more than it sounds. When a market makes a violent vertical move and then goes sideways at the highs instead of giving the move back, it is usually absorbing supply rather than topping out. Sellers who wanted out at $2,400 have been getting filled for four weeks, and price has not cracked.

The measured move math is clean. The $1,600 to $2,000 base was 400 points wide, and the breakout above $2,000 projected $2,400. That target was hit almost exactly. The current $2,400 to $2,600 range is 200 points wide, so a clean daily close above $2,600 projects $2,800. From there, $3,000 is the next horizontal level on the chart, and it is the level that was acting as resistance through the entire first half of the year.

So the path is not a single leap. It is two steps: reclaim and hold $2,600, then run the gap to $2,800 where there is almost no historical resistance, then attack $3,000.

Is the 200 EMA Turning Bullish for Ethereum?

The 200-day EMA sits at $2,212. For eight straight months it pointed down, and every rally in spring and summer died against it. Ethereum is now trading roughly 13% above it, and more importantly, the line itself has flattened and hooked upward for the first time this year.

A rising 200 EMA underneath price is what separates a dead-cat bounce from a trend reversal. As long as ETH stays above it, the medium-term bias flips from bearish to constructive, and pullbacks become buyable instead of terrifying.

RSI backs this up without screaming. The 14-period reading is 59.73, sitting just above its own signal line at 58.70. That is the bullish half of the range with no overbought condition anywhere in sight. Ethereum can rally another 15% before RSI even starts flashing warnings, which is exactly the kind of fuel tank you want before a breakout attempt.

Are ETF Inflows Strong Enough to Push ETH to $3,000?

The chart is not moving in a vacuum. Institutional flow has flipped hard in Ethereum's favor.

US spot Ethereum ETFs pulled in roughly $1.75 billion to $1.85 billion in August 2026, their best month since August 2025, after more than $1 billion had left the funds in May and June. The week ending September 11 added another $197 million, a fourth consecutive positive week, while Bitcoin ETFs bled $463 million over the same stretch. A single session on September 11 brought in $216 million, the largest daily total of that week.

That divergence is the story. Money is not leaving crypto, it is rotating from Bitcoin into Ethereum, and the staking yield inside the newer ETH products is a large part of why. Ethereum spot ETFs now hold $16.31 billion in total net assets, around 5.28% of Ethereum's entire market capitalization.

One caveat worth being honest about: the buying is heavily concentrated, with BlackRock's ETHA accounting for roughly 72% of the inflow streak that began in mid-August. A trend carried by one issuer is a trend with a single point of failure.

The other catalyst is on the roadmap. The Glamsterdam upgrade has slipped to Q4 2026, with the Sepolia testnet fork scheduled for 28 September. A delayed catalyst is still a catalyst, and it lands right in the seasonal window where crypto tends to get interesting.

What Would Invalidate This Ethereum Price Prediction?

$2,400 is the line. It is the breakout level, it is the range floor, and it has now been defended three separate times. Bitfinex analysts also flagged the September 11 daily low near $2,432 as the level to watch on pullbacks. 

A daily close below $2,400 kills the range and puts the $2,212 EMA directly in play. Lose that, and the August candle starts looking like a liquidity event rather than a trend change, with $2,000 the next real shelf underneath.

The bearish case is not just technical. ETF flows can stop as fast as they started, and the macro backdrop around Fed policy has been the single biggest driver of crypto beta all year.

Ethereum Price Prediction: How Soon Can ETH Hit $3,000?

Analyst targets are scattered across a wide band, which tells you the market genuinely does not know. CoinDCX puts September at a $2,800 target with a $2,405 to $2,950 range. LongForecast is far more aggressive, modelling a September close near $2,959 and October at $3,432. Messari's base case is $3,200 to $3,800 by December, with VanEck pointing to $4,500 if macro conditions improve. Prediction markets are more sober, giving roughly a 31% chance of a $3,500 touch before year end.

Strip out the noise and the chart gives a cleaner answer. Ethereum does not need a miracle to see $3,000. It needs one daily close above $2,600 with volume, and the structure opens up. Given the range has already compressed for four weeks with a rising 200 EMA underneath and RSI holding the bullish band, a breakout attempt in October is the base case, not the moonshot case.

Fail at $2,600 again and $ETH simply keeps grinding between $2,400 and $2,600 until something forces a decision. Ranges do not last forever.

This week was supposed to be the one that ended the rally. The Senate killed the crypto industry's biggest legislative push in years on Tuesday. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023 on Wednesday. Two catalysts, 24 hours apart, both pointing down.

$Bitcoin is trading near $77,900 as of Friday, after a previous close of $76,559 and a day range between $76,289 and $78,051. It gave up ground, took it back, and is now sitting almost exactly where it started the week. That is not weakness. That is consolidation, and there are three solid reasons behind it.

What Is Actually Happening in the Crypto Market Right Now?

Over the past 30 days Bitcoin is up 20.5%, having run from roughly $64,000 in mid-August to the high $70,000s, with an average price of $77,286 across the period. August alone delivered a 25% gain.

A market that has just added a fifth of its value in a month does not usually push straight through. It ranges, it shakes out leverage, and it waits for the next input. That is exactly what the $75,000 to $78,000 band has been doing.

Reason 1: The Bad News Was Already in the Price

The Fed hike was priced at roughly 93% odds in futures markets going into the meeting. When the 12-0 decision landed, Bitcoin spiked to about $76,500 within five minutes and gave the move back within half an hour. A market that barely reacts to a confirmed hawkish event has already absorbed it.

The CLARITY Act was a similar story. Bitwise's CIO had already revised his outlook on the bill and argued the bull market can continue without legislation, pointing out that Bitcoin climbed above $80,000 in early September even as the odds of passage were falling. Traders had been repricing the legislative path for weeks before the vote.

Reason 2: Institutional Demand Has Not Left the Table

This is the strongest leg of the argument. Total Bitcoin ETF assets sit above $103 billion after August pulled in $3.52 billion, the best month of 2026.

The altcoin funds tell the same story. On days when spot prices fell, $Ethereum, $Solana and XRP ETFs still posted net inflows of $10.95 million, $10.19 million and $14.38 million, and $XRP funds ran 11 consecutive days of net buying worth roughly $170 million. Nasdaq put $100 million into Payward, Kraken's parent, on September 10 at a $21 billion valuation, and the Canary staked TRX ETF launched on September 9 as the first spot staked crypto fund in the US.

Positioning adds to the case. JPMorgan noted on September 16 that gold ETFs have recovered all of their 2026 outflows while Bitcoin ETFs have recovered only about half, and that short interest in BlackRock's IBIT remains near its highest level of the year. If that hedging pressure unwinds, it becomes fuel rather than drag.

Reason 3: Regulation Is Moving Without Congress

The CLARITY Act failing 49-50 looked like a wall. It is closer to a detour.

The SEC put Regulation Crypto Assets out for comment in August and has since opened a five-year pathway for tokenized US stock trading. The CFTC chair had already instructed staff to build a market-structure regime under existing Commodity Exchange Act authority. Neither depended on the Senate.

Congress has not gone quiet either. The House Financial Services Committee advanced the American Reserve Modernization Act, H.R. 8957, by 28-21, keeping the US Bitcoin reserve idea alive. Outside the US, Canada's financial regulator clarified that tokenized bank deposits are legally equivalent to traditional deposits. The direction of travel has not reversed, only the vehicle has changed.

What Could Still Break the Bull Case?

Being honest about the other side matters. Bitcoin remains roughly 39% below its October 2025 all-time high of $128,198, and the 52-week range runs from $57,833 to $126,186, so this is still a recovery, not a breakout.

The Fed is the real risk. Sixteen of eighteen officials project at least one more hike this year and four expect two, which puts December in play. With the 10-year Treasury yield near 5% and Bitcoin carrying a 0.89 correlation to the S&P 500 and 0.91 to the Nasdaq, crypto is trading as a risk asset right now, not as a hedge. If equities crack, crypto follows.

The short answer first: if you hold Bitcoin privately and move away from Germany, the move itself triggers no tax on your capital gains. There is no deemed sale on the day you deregister and no taxation of unrealised gains on your wallet balance. The exit tax that so many emigrants warn about catches something other than crypto assets.

The move can still become expensive if you overlook the four places where German tax law reaches you even after departure: the moment your tax residence genuinely ends, the one-year holding period that keeps running when you sell, the legal form of your crypto investment, and the question of what your tax office will learn automatically from the 2026 reporting year onwards. This article works through those points in order, under German law, with the statutory references you can put in front of your tax adviser if in doubt.

Does the exit tax under Section 6 AStG apply to Bitcoin held privately?

Exit taxation means the state treats an asset as if you had sold it on the day you left and taxes the increase in value, although not a single euro has reached you. That is a hard intervention, and it is precisely why the legislator drew the scope narrowly.

Section 6 of the Foreign Transactions Tax Act attaches to shareholdings within the meaning of Section 17(1) sentence 1 EStG, meaning holdings in corporations from a stake of one percent upwards. Shares in a German GmbH fall under it, and so do equity blocks above that threshold. A Bitcoin, an Ether or a stablecoin in your own wallet is not a holding in a corporation. The wording of the provision leaves no room here, and that is why there is no German exit tax on directly held crypto assets in private hands. You can read the statute yourself if you want to: Section 6 AStG on the portal of the Federal Ministry of Justice.

The distinction matters in both directions. Anyone holding their coins through their own GmbH is not safe merely because the underlying asset is crypto. In that case the GmbH share is the asset that triggers the exit tax, and the value of the coins inside it helps determine how much tax falls due. The structure is widespread among German investors, and it turns the outcome on its head. Readers interested in the motives behind such departures will find the reasons and the destination countries set out in our survey of why crypto investors emigrate.

When does your unlimited tax liability end: residence under Section 8 AO and habitual abode under Section 9 AO

The decisive question when you leave is not when you boarded the plane but when your unlimited tax liability ends. You are subject to unlimited tax liability for as long as you have a residence or your habitual abode in Germany. The German tax authorities then capture your worldwide income, including gains made on a crypto exchange in Singapore.

Residence: the key counts, not the deregistration certificate

Section 8 of the Fiscal Code defines residence by the facts on the ground: you keep a dwelling under circumstances suggesting that you will retain and use it. Deregistering at the residents' registration office is evidence of that and nothing more. Anyone who leaves the old flat standing empty, who keeps a room in the family home available at any time, or who has held on to the key to a shared flat risks the tax office treating the residence, and with it full tax liability, as continuing. A genuine tenancy agreement solves the problem. An accommodation arranged as a favour among relatives usually does not.

Habitual abode: the six-month line

Section 9 of the Fiscal Code adds the habitual abode: anyone staying in Germany for more than six consecutive months is subject to unlimited tax liability even without a dwelling, and short interruptions count towards the period. For emigrants with a German client base this is the most common trap. Spend every summer in Germany without ever documenting the days and you will have nothing to set against a tax audit later. Keep a plain travel log from day one, with dates, border crossings and evidence.

If your unlimited tax liability ends mid-year, you also need a tax report that separates the periods cleanly. Many portfolio tools default to full calendar years. Which programs handle partial periods and several tax jurisdictions is set out in our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

The one-year holding period under Section 23 EStG keeps running when you leave

For as long as you are subject to unlimited tax liability in Germany, gains on the sale of crypto assets are private disposal transactions under Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 EStG. If more than a year lies between acquisition and sale, the gain stays tax-free. Below that it counts as taxable income and is charged at your personal rate. An exemption limit of 1,000 euros applies to all private disposal transactions of a year taken together. An exemption limit is not an allowance: one euro above it makes the entire gain taxable.

Leaving the country does not interrupt that period, it only shifts who taxes at the end. What counts is the actual sale or swap, and where you are tax resident at that moment. From this follows the most practical rule in this article: do not sell while your change of residence is still incomplete. Cash in coins inside the one-year period two weeks before you deregister and you pay the full German rate on the entire gain.

The reverse holds as well. Your acquisition data does not disappear because you leave the country. Your new country of residence will ask, by its own rules, when you bought and at what price, and some states use the value at the time of arrival. Which records support a German holding period is something we have written up in detail elsewhere, and the same paperwork will serve you abroad.

Crypto ETPs, ETFs and fund units: where the exit tax under Section 19 InvStG does bite

This is where matters turn unexpectedly serious for many German investors. Since 1 January 2025 the Investment Tax Act has had its own exit tax for fund units held privately. Under Section 19(3) InvStG, the end of unlimited tax liability through giving up a residence or a habitual abode is treated as a disposal at fair market value. The tax authorities therefore act as though you had sold your fund units on the day you left.

That is triggered only above two thresholds, either of which suffices: you held at least one percent of a fund's issued units at some point in the past five years, or your units in that fund carry acquisition costs of at least 500,000 euros. Anyone with a larger portfolio of broad equity ETFs alongside a crypto allocation breaches the second threshold sooner than they would like.

Whether your crypto position itself falls under this depends purely on the legal form of the product. An investment unit is a unit in an investment fund within the meaning of the Investment Tax Act. The crypto ETPs common in Europe, by contrast, are mostly structured as debt securities, meaning ETNs, and therefore precisely not fund units. A US spot ETF on Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a fund. Check each position individually for what you actually hold, and use the terms of issue or the key information document for that, not the product name on your brokerage statement. On departure this distinction decides a five-figure tax bill.

Extended limited tax liability under Section 2 AStG: when a low-tax country holds you for ten years

Extended limited tax liability is a run-on. Germany continues to tax you after you leave, though only on certain categories of income and only under narrow conditions. It is governed by Section 2 AStG and catches only those who meet every criterion at once.

First, in the ten years before the end of your unlimited tax liability you must have been subject to unlimited income tax as a German national for at least five years in total. Second, you must be resident in a low-tax territory or in no state at all; the law measures this against a comparative income of 77,000 euros and a burden of less than two thirds of the German income tax. Third, you need substantial economic interests in Germany, which Section 2(3) AStG assumes among other things where domestic income exceeds 62,000 euros or domestic assets exceed 154,000 euros. Where all of that applies, the run-on lasts until ten years after the end of the year of departure, and it takes effect only above 16,500 euros of income subject to limited tax liability in an assessment period.

For crypto investors the point is delicate, because Section 2 AStG captures all income that does not constitute foreign income within the meaning of Section 34d EStG. A gain on the sale of coins can be allocated neither to foreign real estate nor to a foreign permanent establishment, so the classification has to be settled case by case. Anyone moving to Dubai, Paraguay or a similarly taxing country while keeping German rental income or a stake in a German company should settle that question with a tax adviser before the move rather than after it.

Commercial trading and business assets: deemed disposal instead of exit tax

If you hold your crypto assets as business assets, a different system applies. Deemed disposal means that Germany treats an asset as withdrawn as soon as the German right of taxation over it is excluded or restricted; the legal basis is Section 4(1) sentence 3 EStG. Move your business abroad and cessation of business under Section 16(3a) EStG comes into play on top.

So anyone trading commercially, mining commercially or running a trading structure can well trigger taxation of unrealised gains on departure, and that without Section 6 AStG being needed at all. The line between private asset management and a trade depends on scale, external financing, organisation and outward appearance. If that question gives you pause, that in itself is a sign that a case-by-case review is needed.

Double tax treaties: who taxes when both states see you as resident

In the first months after a move it often happens that two states treat you as tax resident at the same time. German double tax treaties provide an order of precedence for this, modelled on Article 4 of the OECD Model Convention: first the permanent home, then the centre of vital interests, then the habitual abode, and finally nationality.

The centre of vital interests is where most emigrants come unstuck, and it is measured by mundane things. Where does your family live, where is your doctor, where is the sports club, where is the current account that pays the running costs. You do not change country with a passport alone. Most treaties, incidentally, allocate gains on the sale of crypto assets to the state of residence, because they fall under the catch-all clause for other property. That too is what makes a clean determination of residence so important.

Where your coins sit: self-custody, exchange accounts and the duty to cooperate under Section 90 AO

The location of your coins is irrelevant for tax purposes; the location of your records is not. The Federal Ministry of Finance circular of 6 March 2025 on individual questions of the income tax treatment of certain crypto assets regulated the duties to cooperate and to keep records explicitly for the first time, and it replaces the older circular of 10 May 2022. Anyone buying or selling through centralised trading platforms run by foreign operators is subject to the extended duty to cooperate in cross-border matters under Section 90(2) AO. In plain terms, you have to establish the facts and obtain the evidence yourself, and the tax office may estimate if you cannot. The full text is available as a PDF from the Federal Ministry of Finance.

That creates a practical difference between the forms of custody. An exchange account is tied to an identity and to a country: many providers block or restrict accounts when the registered address changes to a country they do not serve, and exporting the trading history then becomes difficult. A self-custody wallet moves with you and needs nobody's consent. The price is that nobody else keeps your records. If you are switching to self-custody, do it before you leave rather than after, and download every transaction history first. Which device suits you is covered in our hardware wallet comparison.

What the tax office learns about your crypto accounts from 2026: DAC8 and the KStTG

DAC8 is EU Directive 2023/2226 on cooperation between tax administrations, which obliges providers of crypto services to report on their customers. Germany implemented it through the Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act, which came into force on 1 January 2026. The first reporting period is the 2026 calendar year; providers transmit the data by 31 July 2027 to the Federal Central Tax Office, which exchanges it with partner states.

For a departure that has two consequences. First, your master data and aggregated transactions for 2026 are reported even if you move away in the course of that year, and the comparison with your final German tax return does take place. Second, the report follows the country of residence that you give your provider. An out-of-date address in your customer account therefore generates reports to the wrong country, and untangling that costs more time than updating it in good time. How the reported amount is arrived at, and why it does not correspond to your gain, is explained in our piece on crypto reporting duties and the difference between the gross amount and the gain.

The misconceptions that get expensive when you emigrate with Bitcoin

“I have deregistered, so I am out.” Deregistration is registration law, not tax law. What counts is dwelling and abode under Sections 8 and 9 AO.

“Crypto falls under the exit tax.” For directly held coins in private assets it does not arise. For fund units above the thresholds of Section 19 InvStG, and for shares in corporations, the picture is different.

“After the move I can sell tax-free.” That holds only if your unlimited tax liability had genuinely ended at the time of sale, no run-on under Section 2 AStG applies, and your new country of residence does not tax the transaction itself.

“My exchange is abroad, so nobody finds out.” Since the 2026 reporting year that is a mistaken assumption made with fair warning, and the cross-border element triggers the stricter duty to cooperate on top.

“I will sort that out after the move.” Almost every planning option in this article requires you to use it before the cut-off date. After that, all you are doing is documenting.

Which records to secure before you move

The burden of proof for the date and the cost of acquisition lies with you, and it does not lapse with your residence. Before you leave, download the complete transaction export as a CSV from every platform, along with the annual statements, the bank's deposit and withdrawal receipts, and the account statements showing the euro inflows.

What is usually missing once it is needed

Records from trading venues that have since closed. Wallet addresses you never wrote down and whose link to you only you know. Documentation of swaps between two coins that never touched a euro account and are therefore absent from the bank statement. Evidence of staking and lending income, which many platforms keep for only twelve months. And the record of which units were disposed of in a partial sale, which you have to keep per wallet anyway once you use more than one.

Put the export on a medium that survives the move and keep a second copy separately. A tax report that cleanly closes out your German period is the best investment of this move.

Bitcoin and moving abroad: what to take away

1. Settle the cut-off date first, not the tax. Determine the date on which your dwelling and abode in Germany demonstrably end, and place every sale deliberately before or after it. Keep your position data cleanly separated as you go; the tools that handle partial periods are in the comparison of crypto tax software.
2. Check every position for its legal form. Directly held coins are not caught by the exit tax, while fund units from 500,000 euros of acquisition costs and holdings in corporations are. At the same time, move your custody into a form that travels with you: the options are in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Secure the records before you go. Complete transaction export, bank records, wallet addresses and a closing report for your German period. If you notice that a year has gaps, close it now with one of the portfolio trackers and not when the tax office asks.

This article sets out the legal position and does not replace tax advice in an individual case. On departure in particular the outcome turns on details that only someone who knows your paperwork can judge.

(As of September 18, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

On September 29, 2026 at 14:06:41 UTC, a protocol upgrade on the XRP Ledger arms itself: the batch amendment carrying the internal name BatchV1_1. If you hold XRP on an exchange or in a custodial wallet, there is nothing for you to do. If you run a node of your own, or run a service against a node of your own, this date is a hard deadline, after which your server drops out of the network.

This article explains what the amendment changes, where the date comes from, how to check the status yourself and which caveats are attached to the date. Every figure in this article comes from the validated ledger and from the protocol documentation, not from announcements.

What an amendment on the XRP Ledger is and why it needs no shutdown date

An amendment is a change to the rules of the XRP Ledger protocol that the network's trusted validators vote on, rather than a company scheduling it. That is what separates the process from a classic hard fork with an announced block height: there is no calendar entry that somebody sets, only a condition that the network either meets or does not.

The rule behind it is written into the protocol documentation and it is short. An amendment needs the approval of more than 80 percent of the trusted validators, and it has to hold that approval continuously for two weeks. Only then is it activated. Should approval slip below the threshold at any point during those two weeks, even briefly, the count starts again from the beginning.

For you as a reader that means two things. First, a date of this kind can be verified, because it sits in the ledger and not in a press release. Second, it is not immovable while the two weeks are still running. Both points are the heart of the matter for the date at issue here.

What the BatchV1_1 batch amendment changes technically

Batch is a new transaction type that bundles several individual transactions into one package processed together. According to the protocol reference, a package holds at least two and at most eight inner transactions, which may also come from different accounts. Until now the XRP Ledger required you to submit every step on its own and to hope, with each one, that it went through.

The practical gain lies in the certainty. Anyone submitting two steps one after the other today, say an approval and then a swap, carries the risk that the first step succeeds and the second fails. A package closes that gap, because the network knows the processing rule and enforces it.

Do I have to do anything if my XRP sits on an exchange?

No. That is the most common situation, and the least dramatic one. If your XRP sits with a trading platform or in a custodial wallet, the provider runs the infrastructure and the duty to upgrade is theirs. You do not have to move holdings, sell, or change an address. Shuffling balances in a hurry because of a protocol date mainly produces fees and, in case of doubt, a taxable event that was never needed.

The occasion is still worth a calm inventory that has nothing to do with the date. Do you know which provider holds which part of your balance, how high the withdrawal fee is there, and whether the provider is supervised in the EU? Regardless of the protocol date, those are the more important questions.

What to check if you hold your XRP in self-custody

Even in self-custody the case is usually a simple one. A hardware wallet stores your private key and signs transactions with it; as a rule it reaches the network through the servers of the wallet provider. The keys themselves are never affected by an amendment, because an amendment changes the rules of the chain, not your address and not your access.

What you can do is keep the software you use to reach the wallet up to date, and check once before the date that your recovery words are where you believe them to be. That is basic hygiene and it is right independently of September 29. If you are still undecided about which device to pick, our hardware wallet comparison helps.

Amendment-blocked: what happens to an outdated xrpld node on September 29

Amendment-blocked is the state a server falls into when it does not know an activated protocol rule. The protocol documentation describes the consequences unambiguously: a blocked server can no longer validate ledgers, can no longer submit or process transactions, can no longer take part in consensus and can no longer vote on future amendments.

The decisive sentence stands right beside it: a server's voting configuration has no bearing on this. Anyone who has set their xrpld to vote against the amendment is just as blocked after activation as someone who voted in favour. What gets a server blocked is the missing code that understands the new rule. There is no carrying on against an activated majority decision.

The server does not crash while this happens, and it throws no conspicuous error message on the wall. It keeps answering, only no longer with valid data from the running chain. That is exactly what makes the state dangerous for services that query a node of their own in the background: the application looks healthy and serves a data state that has stopped moving.

Where the September 29, 2026 date comes from and how it is arrived at

The date is calculated, neither derived nor estimated. The validated ledger holds an object that tracks the state of every amendment. It contains a field called Majorities, and for every amendment that has reached the threshold, that field records the point in time from which the two-week period runs.

This editorial team queried the object on September 18, 2026 at around 00:35 UTC through a public XRP Ledger node (ledger index 107058182, response HTTP 200). The Majorities field held exactly one entry: the amendment with the identifier 9F287AED3CDB50A7BD1ACEC24296A30C9B5230CCD136219317AC790E3B884377 and the CloseTime value 842796401.

The XRP Ledger counts time from January 1, 2000. Converting that value gives September 15, 2026, 14:06:41 UTC as the start of the period. Two weeks later falls September 29, 2026, 14:06:41 UTC. The cross-check through the feature query on the same node returned the name BatchV1_1 for the same identifier, along with the values enabled: false and supported: true. The amendment is therefore known to the network and supported, but not yet active.

How to check the status of the amendment yourself

You do not need a node of your own for this. A public XRP Ledger endpoint answers the question with a single request. Anyone comfortable with the command line sends a feature request carrying the identifier above to a public node and reads three fields out of the answer:

• enabled: if this reads false, the amendment is not yet active. Once the value flips to true, activation has taken place.
• supported: if this reads true, the software of the node you asked already knows the rule. If it reads false, that very node will be blocked at activation.
• majority: the timestamp from which the two-week period runs. Should this field disappear again, the majority has slipped and the countdown has been reset.

That third point is precisely why you should look at the status once more shortly before the date, instead of writing the date down and ticking it off. The same route applies to a node of your own, with one important difference: send the feature query to your server, not to somebody else's. Only the answer of your own node tells you anything about your own node.

Which software version brings the new rule with it

The server software of the XRP Ledger is called xrpld and is published as open software. The current release is 3.4.0, published on September 17, 2026; before that came 3.3.0 of August 6, 2026 (both dates taken from the release dates of the official source code archive, retrieved on September 18, 2026).

Copying a version number out of an article is still the weaker route. The reliable answer comes from your own server through the supported field: it answers the question of whether the running software actually knows the rule. Which version you believe you are running plays no part in it. If false stands there, only an update helps, and it has to happen before September 29.

Why the date carries a caveat

The two-week period runs for as long as approval stays above 80 percent. Should it fall below, the counter is reset and September 29 lapses. That clause is no theoretical footnote; it is the safety mechanism built into the procedure. It leaves the validators the option, right up to the last moment, of stopping a change if a problem surfaces in the meantime.

For your planning, one simple stance follows from this. Treat September 29 as the deadline you prepare for, and treat its arrival as unsettled. Anyone who updates a node loses nothing if the countdown is reset. Anyone who postpones the update because the date might still fall through ends up, in the opposite case, with a system cut off from the chain.

The four modes of a batch package and what they mean in daily use

A package is given a mode when it is submitted, and that mode determines how the network deals with failures. The protocol reference names four:

• AllOrNothing: every single transaction in the package has to succeed. If one fails, the whole package fails. This is the mode for sequences that only make sense in full.
• OnlyOne: as soon as the first transaction has succeeded, the remaining ones are skipped. It allows alternatives to be submitted of which exactly one should take effect.
• UntilFailure: the transactions run in order until one fails; everything after that is dropped. This suits sequences that build on one another.
• Independent: all transactions are processed independently of one another, regardless of whether individual ones fail. This is pure bundling without chaining.

As a holder you will rarely set these modes yourself. The difference becomes visible where applications make use of it: in wallet interfaces that gather several steps into one confirmation, and in trading applications, where a half-executed sequence has so far been the most awkward case of all.

What services, wallet providers and payment processors should clarify now

Anyone who reaches the XRP Ledger through infrastructure of their own rather than through an outside provider is affected. That includes payment services, trading applications, accounting tools with their own data feed and every wallet whose provider runs a node. For this group, three questions need answering before the date.

1. Does the feed run against a node of your own or against an outside endpoint? With an outside endpoint the duty lies with its operator, and you should ask there instead of acting yourself.
2. Does your own node report the value supported: true for BatchV1_1? If not, an update is due, with the usual lead time for testing and a maintenance window.
3. Would a data state that has stopped moving show up in your monitoring at all? A blocked node keeps answering. Monitoring that only checks reachability notices nothing of it. Whoever monitors the gap between the last validated ledger and the current time notices it immediately.

Experience says the third question is the one on which everything hangs. An outage that disguises itself as normal operation is discovered late, and in the meantime bookings and displays carry on working with old data.

How this date fits into the run of amendments so far

The procedure is routine on the XRP Ledger and runs several times a year. Most recently, on September 9, 2026, we described the activation of the previous amendment; anyone who wants to read the sequence through from the start again will find it in our article on which points to check on wallet, node and position. The mechanics are the same, only this time a concrete date and an open condition hang on it.

For placing the network as a whole, a look at what is being built on it remains more telling than any single protocol step. One example from February 2026 is the euro stablecoin of Société Générale, which is issued on the XRP Ledger. Applications of that kind are the reason binding transaction packages are in demand at all: anyone automating payment sequences wants no half-executed chains.

XRP Ledger batch amendment: what you take away from it

1. If your XRP sits with a provider, you do nothing. Use the date at most for a calm check on whether the provider still suits you: the overview of the best crypto exchanges puts fees and withdrawal routes side by side.
2. If you hold your own coins, check access and recovery, not the protocol. Your keys are not affected by an amendment. Which device is up to the job is shown by the hardware wallet comparison.
3. If you run a node of your own, send the feature query before September 29. If supported: false stands there, update the software. Anyone who also needs an overview of their holdings and how they are recorded for tax will find the tools for it under crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

The primary sources for this article: the description of the amendment procedure and the protocol reference for the batch transaction, both in the official documentation of the XRP Ledger.

(As of September 18, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Anyone who sells a bitcoin position at a loss in order to use that loss for tax purposes, and buys the same quantity back shortly afterwards, triggers two things at once in Germany. The loss is realized and remains deductible. At the same time, the one-year holding period starts again from scratch for the quantity bought back. That is the price of the decision, and it hangs on a single date: the acquisition date of the new units.

The occasion is this week's slide. On September 17, 2026, Bitcoin stood at $76,555, or €66,712, and Ethereum at $2,453 and €2,138. Cryptoticker.io retrieved these figures on the same day through CoinGecko's public price interface. Many positions opened over the past year are therefore under water, and the question of whether to take the loss and get straight back in is coming up in a great many German portfolios at the same time.

Selling at a loss and buying back: what really happens for tax

In Germany, crypto assets count as other economic assets. Selling them therefore falls under private disposal transactions in section 23 of the Income Tax Act, not under the flat withholding tax. That sounds like a technicality, but it determines everything that follows.

A private disposal transaction is a sale within one year of acquisition. The gain from it is taxed at your personal income tax rate, and in return the loss from it can be offset. Anyone who sells after the year has elapsed stays tax-free, and that cuts both ways: the gain goes untaxed, but the loss is equally without effect.

That second half is routinely overlooked. A position bought eighteen months ago and sitting 30 percent under water today no longer carries any usable tax loss. That position is outside the period. Selling it brings nothing except liquidity.

The three figures you need for every lot

For each individual lot in your holdings, three pieces of information count: the acquisition date, the acquisition cost and the quantity. The acquisition date tells you whether the one-year period is still running. The acquisition cost tells you whether there is a loss at all. The quantity tells you how much of it you can move without touching other lots. Crypto tax software with portfolio tracking shows you these three values separately for each purchase, and without them the decision about a loss sale cannot be taken cleanly.

The one-year period in section 23: why a buyback starts a new clock

The holding period is the time between the acquisition and the disposal of a particular unit. That period attaches to the unit, not to the coin and not to the account. Every purchase starts its own clock.

From this follows the central point of this article. If you sell 0.3 bitcoin today that you bought in January 2026, and buy 0.3 bitcoin again ten minutes later, you have not restored the same position. You have a new position with a new acquisition date. The old eight months of holding time are not transferable; they were used up by the sale. The new unit does not become tax-free until September 2027.

On a position that is only a few weeks old anyway, this costs almost nothing. On a position that would have reached the one-year mark in three months, it costs those three months plus another twelve. That is the real calculation, and it comes out differently for every lot.

Is there a wash sale rule in Germany as there is in the US?

No. Under US tax law, a wash sale is a loss-making sale in which the same or a substantially identical security is bought back within thirty days before or after the sale. Section 1091 of the Internal Revenue Code denies the deduction of the loss in that case; it is added to the cost basis of the new position instead.

German income tax law has no equivalent for private disposal transactions. Section 23 contains no blocking period for re-entry, and there is no provision that shifts the loss into the new acquisition cost. The loss stays where it arose, in the year of the sale.

Anyone reading American guides or using an international tax tool should know this difference before deriving rules for the German tax office from them. The thirty-day window that regularly appears in such texts has no bearing on a German tax return.

Section 42 of the Fiscal Code and the same-day buyback: what the Federal Fiscal Court decided

That leaves the objection tax offices occasionally raise in such cases: abuse of legal structuring. Under section 42 of the German Fiscal Code, this exists where a legal arrangement essentially serves to obtain a tax advantage not provided for by law.

There is a decision directly on point, and it concerns precisely the provision discussed here. In a judgment of August 25, 2009, case reference IX R 60/07, the Federal Fiscal Court held that there is no abuse of structuring where a taxpayer sells securities at a loss within the one-year period and buys back securities of the same type and number at a different price on the same day. Sale and buyback, the court held, are to be assessed as separate transactions. The matter in dispute was a private disposal transaction under section 23, that is, the same provision crypto assets fall under today.

The judgment was handed down on shares and not on crypto assets, and it is not a blank cheque. It is, however, the closest thing to a supreme court statement on this constellation, and it supports the view that re-entry as such does not endanger the loss. Anyone wanting full certainty should have the case reviewed by a tax adviser before filing; a binding ruling from the tax office is the only route to genuine legal certainty in an individual case.

FIFO: why the bitcoin you buy back joins the back of the queue

FIFO stands for first in, first out and means that the unit acquired first counts as the one disposed of first. For crypto assets, the German Federal Ministry of Finance set out this consumption order in more detail in its circular of March 6, 2025, together with the record-keeping and cooperation duties attached to it. The circular carries the file number IV C 1 - S 2256/00042/064/043 and replaces the version from May 2022. It is publicly available from the Federal Ministry of Finance.

In practice that means your purchases stand in a line, ordered by date. When you sell, the line is cleared from the front. The buyback joins the end of that line.

This creates a trap that springs particularly often in a drawdown. The units at the front of the line are the oldest, and therefore often the ones with the longest holding time and the best tax position. Anyone triggering a partial sale in order to realize a loss reaches, under FIFO, for exactly those old units first, and those may well not be under water at all. A loss sale that hits the wrong lot produces a taxable gain instead of a usable loss.

How to keep them apart in practice

The wording of the law can be read in the full text of section 23 of the Income Tax Act. The consumption order can only be controlled cleanly if holdings are kept separately per wallet and per exchange account, because under the ministry circular the assessment is made in principle per individual wallet or per individual account. Anyone holding the same coin on three platforms has three separate lines and not one shared one. Which exchange gives you which export formats differs considerably; a look at our crypto exchange comparison is worth the time before you plan a loss sale spanning several accounts.

The price of the buyback: when you trade an almost tax-free lot for a loss

The decision can be boiled down to one question: which is worth more, the loss today or the remaining holding time?

On a lot that is only two months old, the answer is usually clear. Ten months of remaining period is a manageable stake, and the loss takes effect immediately. On a lot that is eleven months old, the picture flips. One month separates it from tax exemption; a buyback resets it to twelve months and extends the window in which a later gain would be taxable by eleven months.

On top of that comes a point easily lost in the arithmetic: a loss is only worth something if a gain from a private disposal transaction stands against it in the same year or in a later one. Losses under section 23 land in their own offsetting pot. They cannot be set against employment income, rental income or investment income from shares. Anyone not expecting corresponding gains realizes a loss that sits unused for years. We set out the mechanics of this offsetting and the deadlines in detail in our article on crypto losses before the one-year period expires of September 9, 2026.

The 1,000 euro exemption threshold: when a loss sale is worth it at all

An exemption threshold is a limit at which the entire amount becomes taxable once it is exceeded, not just the excess. For private disposal transactions it stands at €1,000 of total gains in a calendar year.

For the buyback decision this means two things. If your annual gain from private disposal transactions stays below the threshold anyway, an additionally realized loss is worthless for tax, because there is nothing to reduce. And conversely: if you are just above the threshold, a targeted loss sale can push the total gain below €1,000 and thereby make the entire amount tax-free. That is the only case in which a loss sale pays off in a jump rather than proportionally.

Grandfathering at December 31, 2026: what a buyback next year could change

A draft bill on the future taxation of crypto assets is on the table, providing for a switch to the flat withholding tax from 2027 and for grandfathering of holdings acquired before then. It is a draft and not applicable law; none of it has been adopted, and the cut-off date may move or disappear entirely.

But if it does come to pass, the acquisition date takes on a second meaning beyond the one-year period. Units you buy back today would have been acquired before the cut-off date. Units you only buy back in January would not. Anyone already weighing a loss sale with a subsequent buyback therefore has an argument for not pushing it into next year. We gathered the state of the draft and the open questions in our piece on the holding period and grandfathering of September 8, 2026.

What matters is the order of certainty: the one-year period applies today and is law. Grandfathering is an expectation. A decision resting on the expectation alone stands on one leg.

What proof the tax office wants for the loss and the buyback

The ministry circular of March 6, 2025 framed the record-keeping and cooperation duties considerably more sharply than its predecessor. For a loss sale with a buyback this means, concretely: both transactions must be individually documented, with time, quantity, price and platform.

In practice you need the exchange's transaction export for the sale and for the buyback, each with a timestamp. If the position came from your own wallet, proof of origin is required on top. A statement showing the holding only as a total is not enough, because the one-year period attaches to the individual lot.

The mistake that is hardest to correct

Export the data promptly. Anyone who discovers after a delisting, an account closure or a change of provider that the history is no longer retrievable has lost the proof and with it the loss. That is not a theoretical risk: in the past few weeks alone, several trading venues have set deadlines for withdrawing balances, after which the account interface was no longer reachable.

Three cases from the current drawdown worked through

The amounts below are freely chosen worked examples and not a price forecast. The cases only show how the variables interact.

Case one, a young lot at a loss. Bought in July 2026 for €8,000, current value €6,400. Loss €1,600, remaining period around ten months. A sale with an immediate buyback realizes the loss and resets the clock to twelve months. Anyone with gains from other crypto sales in the same year comes out clearly ahead here.

Case two, an old lot just short of the finish line. Bought in October 2025 for €10,000, current value €8,500. The loss of €1,500 is real, but the period runs out in a few weeks. A buyback trades an almost achieved tax exemption for a loss that is only worth something if there are enough offsettable gains. In most portfolios, waiting is the calmer option here.

Case three, a lot outside the period. Bought in February 2025, current value well below. Nothing happens for tax on a sale, neither a gain nor a usable loss. A sale here is a pure investment decision with no tax effect. We worked through a similar constellation on the gains side for Ethereum profits and the holding period on September 14, 2026.

Bitcoin losses and buybacks: what to take away

1. Sort by acquisition date first, not by price. Check for each lot whether the one-year period is still running. Only within the period is a loss worth anything at all, and only there does a buyback cost you holding time. Tax software with portfolio tracking compiles this list automatically for each purchase.
2. Weigh the loss against the remaining period. Young lots at a loss are the obvious candidates, lots just short of the anniversary the most expensive. And check beforehand whether you have any gains from private disposal transactions in the same year for the loss to be offset against.
3. Secure the records the same day. Export the sale and the buyback with timestamps, separated by wallet and account. Which exports your exchange offers is shown in our crypto exchange comparison; if the proof is missing later, the loss goes with it.

(As of September 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Investigators say tracing the network's crypto transactions exposed links to organized crime and murder-for-hire.

OFAC says hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin moved through BitBank to the Revolutionary Guards in two months.

OpenAI's new transparency framework reveals AI models that invented fake "breach alerts," coached themselves to hide mistakes, and smuggled a file onto the public internet to talk to each other.

Brookings researchers in the US and China are urging Washington and Beijing to agree to keep humans in control of nuclear weapons.

SpaceX's AI division has held internal talks about buying customer records from dead startups—cheap fuel for Grok, no questions asked, because there's nobody left to ask them.

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz suggests reasons why exchanges are holding back from listing a Bitcoin-split asset, while they had previously supported other Bitcoin forks.

$0 Shiba Inu removed from its supply in hours, with SHIB community paying close attention to what comes next.

Popular market trader and technical analyst Will Meade has predicted that Bitcoin could return to $100,000 before the U.S. midterm elections.

NEAR’s biggest rally in months is being fueled by more than speculation as the protocol’s evolving cross-chain trading strategy gains traction.

Ripple CTO David Schwartz drops GIFs on X to expose a fake Xaman wallet airdrop, halting an active phishing raid on XRP users.

TLDR

• Micron Technology (MU) shares advanced more than 1% during Friday’s premarket session to $989.50, supported by positive momentum in the tech sector
• Reports indicate China’s CXMT is developing a NAND flash memory research and development production facility in Beijing, marking its expansion beyond DRAM chips
• NAND flash memory represents approximately 25% of Micron’s total revenue stream; the company commands about 15% of worldwide NAND market share
• Memory market data shows DRAM segment expanded 57% while NAND segment surged 70% sequentially in Q2, indicating robust industry demand
• Micron’s Q4 earnings announcement is scheduled for September 30, with Wall Street analysts maintaining a Buy recommendation and $1,521.74 average target price

Micron (MU) shares advanced 1.23% to reach $989.50 during Friday’s premarket session, benefiting from strength across the semiconductor industry as Nasdaq futures posted a 0.54% gain.

Micron Technology, Inc., MU

The upward movement coincided with significant developments from China. According to a Reuters report, CXMT—the Chinese memory manufacturer whose shares soared 466% during its Shanghai Stock Exchange debut this year—is preparing to establish a NAND flash memory research and development production facility at a new Beijing location.

This represents a strategic shift for the company. CXMT has historically concentrated on DRAM technology, but entering the NAND flash segment would create direct rivalry with Micron, SK Hynix, and Chinese competitor Yangtze Memory Technologies.

YMTC currently commands 14% of worldwide NAND market share as of the second quarter, per Counterpoint Research data. CXMT’s entry would intensify competition within this space.

Presently, Samsung dominates the NAND landscape with 28% market share, with SK Hynix holding 19%. Micron controls approximately 15%, while Sandisk accounts for 11%.

NAND flash technology comprises roughly 25% of Micron’s overall revenue stream, making competitive developments in this category noteworthy. SK Hynix maintains comparable NAND exposure levels.

Evaluating the Competitive Landscape

However, CXMT’s timeline for potential commercial NAND manufacturing remains uncertain. Industry analysts suggest that initial production, if realized, would likely prioritize China’s domestic market, potentially impacting YMTC more significantly than Micron.

Micron maintains a smaller NAND market position compared to SK Hynix, providing somewhat better protection against Chinese competitive pressures.

The overall memory industry continues demonstrating robust expansion. According to Counterpoint analysis, DRAM revenues increased 57% sequentially during Q2, while NAND revenues jumped 70%. Such substantial growth rates suggest sufficient market capacity for multiple manufacturers to achieve strong performance despite intensifying competition.

Domestic Manufacturing and Market Outlook

Within the United States, Micron continues advancing its domestic manufacturing footprint. The company is constructing a state-of-the-art memory manufacturing plant in Boise, Idaho, along with an additional facility in Clay, New York.

These investments align with efforts by NVIDIA and AMD to secure additional memory supply amid constrained market availability.

From a technical perspective, MU is currently trading 3.5% above its 20-day moving average of $957.53 and 6.9% above its 50-day moving average of $926.77. The Relative Strength Index stands at 53.95, indicating neutral momentum.

Important technical levels include resistance at $1,012 and support at $887.50.

Wall Street sentiment toward Micron remains strongly bullish. The stock carries a consensus Buy rating with an average analyst price target of $1,521.74. Mizuho maintained its Outperform rating while reducing its target to $1,300. New Street Research elevated its recommendation to Buy with a $1,250 price objective. Citigroup reaffirmed its Buy rating at $1,150.

MU shares have surged 478.78% during the trailing twelve-month period.

Market participants will receive the next significant update on September 30, when Micron releases its quarterly financial results.

The post Micron Technology (MU) Stock Climbs As Chinese Rival CXMT Plans NAND Flash Expansion appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Wells Fargo shifted Netflix from Equal Weight to Underweight, reducing the price target from $80 down to $57
• Shares declined 2.1% in pre-market hours and closed Thursday’s trading down 1.4% at $75.31
• This represents the first Underweight recommendation among sell-side analysts tracking Netflix
• Key issues highlighted include declining viewer engagement and expensive live sports broadcasting rights
• Wall Street’s overall consensus remains “Moderate Buy” with a mean price target of $96.53

In an uncommon bearish stance, Wells Fargo downgraded Netflix from Equal Weight to Underweight while dramatically reducing its price objective from $80 to $57. The announcement triggered a 2.1% pre-market decline for NFLX on September 18, ultimately closing Thursday’s trading session down 1.4% at $75.31.

Netflix, Inc., NFLX

During the session, shares touched an intraday low of $75.30, accompanied by trading volume of approximately 27.7 million shares—roughly 35% lighter than the typical daily average of 42.6 million.

Prior to Wells Fargo’s downgrade, Netflix enjoyed 35 buy recommendations and 16 hold ratings across Wall Street, with no sell ratings whatsoever. The introduction of this first Underweight call represents a notable departure in Street sentiment toward the streaming leader.

While the concerns aren’t entirely fresh, Wells Fargo has now formally documented them. Deteriorating user engagement metrics and escalating expenses tied to live sports broadcasting rights formed the foundation of their bearish thesis.

The streaming platform has aggressively expanded into live programming and sporting events to maintain subscriber attention, yet market participants remain skeptical about the financial viability. Sports broadcast licenses carry hefty price tags, and the return on investment remains murky.

The shares were already facing headwinds before this latest session. NFLX currently trades significantly below its 52-week peak of $124.86, though it maintains a cushion above the 52-week floor of $65.08. The 200-day moving average rests at $84.36, with the current price trading beneath that technical benchmark as well.

Market conditions weren’t the culprit. The Nasdaq, S&P 500, and Dow Jones Industrial Average all posted gains on Thursday, positioning Netflix as a notable underperformer.

The Analyst Landscape

The broader analyst community has yet to mirror Wells Fargo’s pessimistic stance. Overall Wall Street sentiment holds at “Moderate Buy” with a collective price target of $96.53, substantially above current trading levels.

Wolfe Research maintained its Outperform designation with a $95 price objective in late August. Evercore similarly preserved its Outperform stance while elevating its target to $110. Deutsche Bank carries a $110 projection on the shares.

TD Cowen trimmed its estimate from $112 to $100 in July while preserving a Buy recommendation. Itau BBA lowered its target from $151.40 to $96 while keeping an Outperform rating intact.

Positive Developments

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square allegedly re-established its Netflix stake during the second quarter, demonstrating conviction from a prominent institutional player.

Analysts have also identified Netflix’s expanding advertising platform and ongoing stock buyback initiative as possible catalysts for future value creation.

Regarding financial performance, Netflix delivered $0.80 earnings per share in its July quarter, narrowly surpassing the $0.79 analyst consensus. Revenue totaled $12.56 billion, marginally missing the $12.58 billion forecast, while still representing a 13.4% year-over-year increase.

Executive Activity

CEO Ted Sarandos divested 27,312 shares on August 4 at an average execution price of $73.35, generating proceeds exceeding $2 million. The transaction occurred through a pre-established 10b5-1 trading arrangement designed to satisfy tax liabilities associated with equity compensation vesting.

Company insiders collectively sold 179,045 shares over the past 90 days, representing approximately $13.1 million in total value. Institutional stakeholders control 80.93% of outstanding shares.

The full-year EPS consensus forecast from the analyst community currently sits at $3.59.

The post Netflix (NFLX) Stock Drops After Wells Fargo Issues Rare Sell Rating appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Shares of SK Hynix climbed 5.6% to ₩1,843,000 on Friday’s trading session, while SKHY gained over 4.6% during U.S. premarket hours
• Solidigm, the company’s American unit, is evaluating plans for a NAND flash memory manufacturing plant in upstate New York
• Concurrent discussions with Intel explore possibilities for memory chip manufacturing at Intel’s Ohio production site
• The memory chipmaker commands 50% of the HBM market and is currently developing a $4 billion Indiana manufacturing complex
• Wall Street analysts on TipRanks assign SKHY a Strong Buy rating with a consensus price target of $249.70, representing 36.5% potential gains

SK Hynix shares experienced significant upward momentum on Friday following simultaneous announcements regarding two distinct U.S. manufacturing initiatives, providing considerable optimism for market participants.

SK hynix Inc., SKHY

The Korean semiconductor manufacturer saw its shares climb 5.6% to ₩1,843,000 on the KOSPI exchange, while American depositary receipts trading as SKHY increased more than 4.6% during premarket activity on September 18.

The initial development involves Solidigm, the U.S. division of SK Hynix, exploring possibilities for constructing a NAND flash memory production facility on American territory. Sources with knowledge of the situation indicate upstate New York is under consideration as a prospective site, according to Reuters reporting.

Establishing an American manufacturing base would provide Solidigm with an alternative production hub beyond its current Dalian, China operations. This strategic move would simultaneously minimize the company’s vulnerability to U.S. tariff policies and possible limitations on semiconductor equipment shipments to Chinese facilities.

The company has not finalized any commitments. SK Hynix acknowledged that Solidigm is evaluating various approaches to enhance its market positioning, though emphasized that concrete plans remain unconfirmed. The elevated costs associated with U.S. manufacturing versus South Korean operations continue to be a consideration.

Intel Partnership Discussions Emerge Simultaneously

Complementing the Solidigm developments, Reuters additionally reported that SK Hynix has entered preliminary negotiations with Intel regarding first-time U.S.-based memory chip manufacturing collaboration.

Two potential arrangements are reportedly under discussion: SK Hynix utilizing available capacity at Intel’s forthcoming Ohio semiconductor complex, or establishing a collaborative enterprise with prominent cloud computing companies seeking reliable memory chip supplies.

SK Hynix informed Investing.com that the company is seriously evaluating strategies to broaden its American memory chip manufacturing presence, though final determinations remain pending on this initiative as well.

These Intel-focused negotiations are distinct from the Solidigm NAND manufacturing facility deliberations.

Industry Standing and Strategic Context

SK Hynix maintains a substantial American presence in research and development activities. The corporation is constructing a $4 billion Indiana complex dedicated to sophisticated HBM packaging technologies and innovation, with high-volume manufacturing of next-generation HBM4E products scheduled for 2029.

Within the HBM segment, essential for artificial intelligence accelerators, SK Hynix dominates as the industry leader with 50% of Q2 2026 revenue. Samsung captures 33% of the market, while Micron holds third position with 18%.

For DRAM products, Samsung leads with 39.4% market share, SK Hynix commands 24.9%, and Micron follows with 23.3%. These three manufacturers collectively represent approximately 88% of worldwide DRAM revenues.

In NAND flash memory, Samsung maintains leadership at 29.3% market share. SK Hynix Group, encompassing Solidigm, secures second position with 18.2%, surpassing Micron’s 15.1%.

Favorable macroeconomic conditions amplified the stock movement. U.S. 10-year Treasury yields declined after temporarily exceeding 5% earlier during the week, crude oil prices retreated, and risk sentiment strengthened throughout Asian trading sessions. The KOSPI index advanced approximately 2% for the day, driven by semiconductor sector purchases, as international investors became net acquirers of Korean equities.

Competitor Samsung Electronics similarly recorded session gains.

According to TipRanks, SKHY holds a Strong Buy consensus assessment based on 11 unanimous Buy recommendations, with a mean price objective of $249.70.

The post SK Hynix (SKHY) Stock Jumps 5% on U.S. Expansion News and Intel Partnership Discussions appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• FCEL shares surged 14.26% to reach $17.71 on September 17 following the House’s 417-3 passage of the Ratepayer Protection Act
• The legislation mandates that data centers exceeding 100MW usage bear their own grid infrastructure and power upgrade expenses
• Competing clean energy firms Bloom Energy and Plug Power gained approximately 4% and 5% on the same trading day
• Analyst opinions diverge: Craig-Hallum assigns a Buy rating while Citi starts coverage with Hold and a $19 target
• Consensus analyst target price of $22.67 indicates potential upside of approximately 28% from current trading levels

Shares of FuelCell Energy experienced a substantial rally on September 17, climbing 14.26% to close at $17.71, with momentum carrying into Friday’s pre-market session with an additional 1% advance. This surge followed the overwhelming passage of the Ratepayer Protection Act in the U.S. House of Representatives, which sailed through with a 417-3 vote.

FuelCell Energy, Inc., FCEL

The new legislative framework specifically addresses data centers with power consumption exceeding 100 megawatts. The Act mandates that state utility providers must require these large-scale data centers to bear the full financial burden of grid connection infrastructure and necessary power-supply enhancements, preventing these expenses from being distributed to residential customers and small business owners through elevated utility rates.

Market participants interpreted this development as a favorable catalyst for behind-the-meter energy solution providers such as FuelCell. These behind-the-meter systems produce and store power directly at the customer’s location, effectively operating independently from the traditional power grid infrastructure.

The positive sentiment extended across the clean energy sector, with Bloom Energy advancing approximately 4% and Plug Power gaining about 5% during the same trading session, reflecting broader optimism about the legislation’s implications.

Analyst Community Shows Mixed Sentiment

Following the legislative development, Craig-Hallum’s five-star rated analyst Eric Stine maintained his Buy recommendation on FCEL. Stine highlighted that FuelCell’s carbonate cell technology platform positions the company advantageously for data center applications, potentially accelerating product revenue expansion and establishing a clearer trajectory toward achieving profitability.

Meanwhile, Citi analyst Vikram Bagri adopted a more cautious stance, launching coverage with a Hold rating alongside a $19 price objective, representing approximately 7% potential appreciation. Bagri expressed concern regarding FuelCell’s limited product backlog, which constrains revenue predictability in the near term.

“We also see limited technological advantages versus the industry leader, while FuelCell’s path to profitability depends partly on uncontrolled factors, including customer delivery schedules and conversion of awarded capacity into committed backlog,” Bagri wrote.

Looking at the broader analyst community tracking FCEL over the last three months, the stock maintains a Moderate Buy consensus rating derived from five Buy recommendations, two Hold ratings, and one Sell rating. The mean price objective stands at $22.67, implying approximately 28% upside potential from present valuation levels.

Operational Headwinds Persist

This week’s stock appreciation unfolds against a challenging operational landscape. FuelCell’s latest quarterly results, disclosed on September 2, fell short of Wall Street expectations on both the top and bottom lines. The company reported an adjusted loss of $0.64 per share, significantly wider than the consensus forecast of a $0.41 loss. Total revenue registered at $33 million, missing analyst projections of $38.79 million.

FuelCell currently operates with a negative return on equity of 16.85% and a deeply negative net profit margin of -113.60%. The Street’s full-year consensus calls for a loss of $2.09 per share.

Compounding these operational challenges, multiple law firms have announced a securities class action lawsuit encompassing investors who acquired FCEL shares between June 24 and September 1, 2026. The litigation centers on allegations of production deficiencies, subpar manufacturing output, and delivery postponements. The deadline for lead plaintiff applications falls on November 10, 2026.

In a constructive signal, company Director Homer Livingston III acquired 16,404 shares on September 14 at a per-share price of $15.05, representing a total investment of approximately $247,000. This transaction increased his direct ownership stake by roughly 62%.

From a technical perspective, FuelCell’s 50-day moving average currently sits at $19.28, with the 200-day moving average at $16.42. The company maintains a market capitalization of around $1.41 billion and exhibits a beta coefficient of 2.35, indicating substantial historical price volatility relative to the broader market.

The post FuelCell Energy (FCEL) Stock Surges 14% Following House Legislation Vote appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• Oracle shares advanced 5.2% to $150.58 following impressive fiscal Q1 performance, with revenues climbing 30% annually to $19.3 billion
• Infrastructure cloud revenue more than doubled, soaring 121% to reach $7.4 billion, primarily fueled by OpenAI compute contracts
• Earnings per share reached $1.92, exceeding Wall Street forecasts by $0.18, while adjusted operating margins expanded to 42%
• Chairman Larry Ellison terminated plans to divest up to 50 million shares of his Oracle holdings
• The company maintains approximately $664 billion in performance obligations with roughly $30 billion tied to artificial intelligence contracts

Shares of Oracle (ORCL) surged 5.2% to $150.58 during Thursday trading, reaching an intraday peak of $152.00, following the database giant’s impressive fiscal first-quarter earnings report and growing optimism surrounding its artificial intelligence initiatives.

Oracle Corporation, ORCL

Revenue for the quarter reached $19.3 billion, representing a 30% increase from the same period last year and surpassing analyst projections of $19.1 billion. The technology company’s stock had finished the prior trading session at $143.16.

The most impressive performance came from cloud infrastructure services, which skyrocketed 121% to $7.4 billion, exceeding the Street’s $7.1 billion estimate. This division provides computational resources to artificial intelligence firms, with OpenAI representing a crucial client relationship.

The adjusted operating margin expanded to 42%, rising from slightly above 41% in the year-ago period. This margin improvement materialized despite significant increases in data center investments needed to accommodate AI computing demands.

Earnings per share totaled $1.92, marking a 31% year-over-year increase and landing $0.18 above consensus forecasts. The earnings outperformance enabled Oracle to utilize less capital than market watchers had predicted.

OpenAI Funding Developments Provide Additional Momentum

Market speculation regarding OpenAI pursuing additional funding at a valuation ranging from $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion provided Oracle with supplementary upward momentum. Oracle reportedly maintains a $300 billion, five-year computational services contract with OpenAI, and positive signals about OpenAI’s financial stability diminish concerns that these commitments might not materialize.

Oracle’s remaining performance obligations, representing contracted revenue yet to be recognized, stand at approximately $664 billion. Within that substantial backlog, deals connected to artificial intelligence total about $30 billion.

Larry Ellison additionally terminated a previously disclosed arrangement to potentially sell up to 50 million Oracle shares, eliminating uncertainty that had pressured investor sentiment earlier this week.

Company leadership provided guidance for “at least” $90 billion in fiscal 2027 revenue, employing more assertive language compared to the previous quarter’s outlook. The FY2027 earnings per share guidance also received a modest upward revision to $8.10.

Capital expenditure projections for fiscal 2027 remained unchanged at slightly above $90 billion, consistent with earlier forecasts. Management suggested this figure should gradually decline over time.

Wall Street Price Targets and Sentiment

KeyCorp elevated its FY2027 earnings estimate to $6.82 from $6.50 and boosted its FY2028 projection to $8.95 from $8.70 in response to the quarterly results.

DA Davidson and Wolfe Research maintain buy or outperform recommendations with $225 price objectives. Mizuho holds a $320 target. Royal Bank of Canada adjusted its target downward from $190 to $165 while maintaining a sector perform stance.

The average recommendation among 41 Wall Street analysts stands at “Moderate Buy” with a mean price target of $252.58.

Oracle commands a market capitalization near $455 billion, trades at a price-to-earnings multiple of 23.60, and is valued at approximately 17 times forward earnings projections. By comparison, the S&P 500 trades around 19 times forward earnings.

The stock’s 50-day moving average rests at $141.12. Shares have consistently found buyer support above the $140 level since early August.

The enterprise software provider also declared a quarterly dividend of $0.50 per share, scheduled for payment on October 23, with an ex-dividend date of October 9.

The post Oracle (ORCL) Stock Surges 5% Following Stellar Q1 Results and AI Growth Momentum appeared first on Blockonomi.

This Friday, we examine Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano, Binance Coin, and Hyperliquid in greater detail.

Ethereum (ETH)

This week, Ethereum is up 2% after buyers defended support at $2,400. As long as this key level holds, the price has a good chance to make higher highs in the near term.

Previously, sellers returned at $2,500 and pushed ETH into a pullback, which appears to be ending at the time of this post. Another test of this level could lead to a breakout and a renewed rally, as long as the buy volume supports it.

Looking ahead, Ethereum remains in an uptrend with clear higher lows. This places bulls at an advantage, which they can capitalize on by breaking above $2,500. That would also allow ETH to expand all the way to $2,800 before sellers make their presence known again.

Ripple (XRP)

XRP also closed the week in green, albeit with a modest 1% gain. Still, this allowed buyers to push it above the support at $1.3, which was momentarily lost. This recovery is a positive sign and could encourage further gains in the near future.

The recent correction was also somewhat expected considering that this cryptocurrency rallied to $1.6 in less than a week. Forming a strong base around $1.3 is also critical if XRP wants to break $1.6.

Looking ahead, XRP is forming a clear bullish pattern with higher highs and lows. If the current resistance breaks, then $2 becomes the next major target and will likely act as a magnet for buyers.

Cardano (ADA)

ADA had a good week with an 8% rally that saw the price reverse the recent losses and return on the offensive, with the $0.23 resistance as its major target. Should $0.23 break on a renewed push, this cryptocurrency will aim for $0.30 next.

The current support is just under $0.20 and held well in the recent test. This allowed Cardano to attract new buyers, who are currently dominating the chart. The question is if sellers will return again at $0.23.

Looking ahead, ADA needs to break the current resistance to confirm its bottom under $0.15 and allow the price to expand quickly toward $0.30 and beyond. For that to happen, buyers will have to bring stronger volume.

Binance Coin (BNB)

Binance Coin closed 4% higher after buyers managed to re-confirm the support at $690. This returned confidence in the price action, which is now aiming to make a higher high and, hopefully, aim for $900 next.

This also suggests that the drop under $580 in July was a bearish trap and local low. That’s because, since then, the price has been going up only, despite any pullbacks, which are normal.

Looking ahead, it is likely that BNB will continue its rally and revisit the price levels from early 2026 at around $900. That’s where buyers and sellers will become very active, and the winner will decide how this cryptocurrency closes the year.

Source: TradingView

Hype (HYPE)

This week, Hyperliquid concluded its correction and pumped by 11%, making it the best performer on our list. While the price did not make a new record, it’s very close to doing so and may soon move beyond $90, if this momentum persists.

Hopefully, buyers will turn $85 into a key support. That would allow the price to expand further and eventually aim for $100, which is a key psychological level that everyone is waiting for.

Looking ahead, HYPE’s rally has a good chance to continue, but it is likely to face difficulties as soon as it approaches a three-digit valuation. That’s because sellers could return there to book profits just as another record price is made.

The post Crypto Price Analysis Sep-18: ETH, XRP, ADA, BNB, and HYPE appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A Zcash trader who once won 26 trades in a row is now sitting on a $7.66 million unrealized loss after taking a heavily leveraged short position in ZEC as the privacy coin continued its rally.

The trade shows just how quickly gains from a strong run of successful positions can disappear when someone gets caught on the wrong side of a fast-moving market.

ZEC Rally Leaves Short Trader $7.66M Underwater

Lookonchain reported on September 18 that the trader had recorded an 89% win rate across 47 trades and made more than $9 million before the ZEC short erased those gains.

The current position is a 12,285 ZEC short worth around $18.3 million, with the trader facing liquidation if ZEC reaches about $1,551.

The position dashboard shows just under $1.8 million in account equity against the $18.3 million in total position value, with leverage at 10.82x. The trader has no free margin available, while the unrealized loss stands at $7.66 million. They opened their position at an average price of $867, compared with a mark price near $1,486.

The scale of the bet is notable when compared with the trader’s earlier results, which included profits of roughly $1.9 million on a Bitcoin long and $1.8 million on an Ethereum long, along with several profitable SOL and ZEC positions.

Yesterday, another well-known trader, Garret Jin, faced a paper loss above $26 million on a much larger short worth about $51.5 million, when Zcash touched a fresh 10-year high near $1,400 before pulling back to around $1,330.

ZEC Keeps Climbing

ZEC has since pushed higher again, trading a few dollars short of $1,500 at the time of writing, per CoinGecko data, up more than 10% over 24 hours and 39% in seven days.

The token has also jumped about 200% over 30 days and more than 2,800% in the last year. Some of that momentum traces back to a governance vote that cut Zcash’s block-target spacing from 75 seconds down to 25, and a handful of analysts at the time argued the coin was nowhere near done climbing.

Lookonchain also flagged newly created wallets pulling tens of millions of dollars worth of ZEC off exchanges in the past day or two, activity that tends to tighten supply rather than add to it.

Meanwhile, across the market, approximately $32.7 million in ZEC positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours, and shorts accounted for the overwhelming majority of it, at $27.17 million.

The post Zcash Short Trader Faces $7.66M Paper Loss as ZEC Nears $1,500 appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ripple’s cross-border token has posted a slight decline over the past week and now trades well below its all-time high set in the summer of 2025. Still, one analyst sees the current level as a perfect buying opportunity.

Shiba Inu unveiled a “useful” update related to Shibarium, while Ethereum (ETH) might be gearing up for a rally toward $3,000.

XRP’s Potential

As of this writing, the token is worth around $1.33 (per CoinGecko), representing a 56% collapse on a yearly scale. X user Cryptollica, however, noted that the downtrend has pushed XRP’s two-week RSI to around 33.5.

This is the lowest point in the asset’s history and is usually viewed as a bullish factor. After all, it indicates that XRP has neared oversold territory and could be on the verge of a solid recovery. Cryptollica explained:

“That is the part the market is misreading. Sentiment has been destroyed, momentum has been washed out to a historical extreme, and the asset is being treated as if the story is already over. But this is exactly where asymmetry becomes interesting. Market has already delivered the pain while the long term structire is still active.”

Other market observers anticipating a short-term resurgence include STEPH IS CRYPTO and Crypto Bitlord. The former spotted a “cup and handle” pattern on XRP’s price chart and predicted a potential pump to $2.50, while the latter said they are 99% sure a push toward $2 is coming next.

The Shibarium Update

Earlier this week, the team behind Shiba Inu implemented “a small but useful” update for the layer-2 scaling solution, Shibarium. It refreshed its RPC listing in the Ethereum-lists/chains registry, and Chainlist now has updated connection details.

The update, however, didn’t trigger a price rebound for SHIB, and the community noted that Shibarium continues to struggle with weak usage. A year ago, the protocol fell victim to an exploit, after which daily transactions on the network have plunged to thousands and occasionally even hundreds. Prior to the attack, the figure stood in the millions.

ETH’s Path to $3K

The second-largest cryptocurrency experienced significant volatility over the past several days due to the CLARITY Act’s failure and the Fed’s decision to increase interest rates. Eventually, it settled around $2,500, a modest 1% gain for the week.

Renowned analyst Ali Martinez recently said ETH remains contained within its 4-hour channel. He said the price has reached the structure’s lower boundary and that he’s now closely watching for a potential rebound toward the mid-range and the upper boundary near $2,570.

According to him, this is a key level, and a strong 4-hour close above (backed by volume) could confirm a breakout and open the door to a jump toward $2,700 and even $3,000.

Other analysts, like X user BLADE, were even more optimistic. They noted a double-bottom formation on ETH’s price chart and argued the asset is on the verge of “the biggest move of the cycle,” projecting an explosion beyond $10,000 sometime next year.

The post Major Ripple (XRP) Opportunity, Shiba Inu (SHIB) Updates, and More: Bits Recap September 18 appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The team behind the popular project has released another major KYC and Mainnet migration update, clearing hundreds of thousands of previously stuck Pioneers while introducing new verification methods, including something called a palm-print trial.

The update focuses primarily on so-called “corner cases” that prevented otherwise eligible users from completing KYC or accessing their migrated balances. The largest immediate change affects accounts previously flagged as possible duplicates.

900,000+ Users to Be Unblocked?

The blog post on the project’s official site reads that after additional evaluation, the team had determined that over 417,000 users were caught in the duplicated-account review, but in reality, their accounts did not fall into that category. They can now move forward with KYC, although they must still satisfy all other applicable verification requirements.

Another fix targets an additional 497,000 users whose Mainnet balances became inaccessible because of an issue involving the Fast-Track wallets. Some received their Mainnet wallet through the project’s Fast-Track process and later used it as the destination for migration. However, these wallets sometimes lacked enough Pi tokens to cover the gas fee required to claim the migrated balance because they were created through a different route than the standard KYC process.

The Core Team noted that these issues will be addressed with an update scheduled for deployment within the next week or so. It will unblock those users and prevent the same problem from affecting similar accounts in the future. In total, the fixes should help approximately 914,000 users.

Palm-Print Verification Tested

The second major announcement in the most recent statement involves expansion plans for Pi Network’s identity-verification tools. For a trial that lasts a month, some users will be asked to complete multiple liveness checks, and the team will offer them palm-print capture as an additional authentication method.

Pi Network’s team said palm prints provide another way to verify that users are genuine humans while offering a degree of privacy because the method does not require displaying a face. As with most other Pi Network updates, more on the recent ones can be found in our dedicated article, the feature will be rolled out gradually.

Other changes include improved machine-learning-based resource management to reduce KYC processing errors, broader liveness-check compatibility for older or lower-spec smartphones, and new resubmission options for some users affected by earlier Yoti verification issues or unsupported IDs from Indonesia.

The post Huge Pi Network Update Affects Over 900,000 Pioneers: Details appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said early Friday that someone has hijacked the official Input Output Global (IOG) YouTube channel.

He warned the community not to click on any links on the platform or trust any videos that someone might post there.

Team Working With YouTube

Hoskinson posted the warning on X, saying:

“The IOG YouTube apparently has been compromised. Do not trust any videos or click on any links on it.”

He also said the team was working with YouTube to take the channel down and reset credentials.

At the time of writing, IOG’s own X account had not mentioned the alleged compromise, although several Cardano-focused accounts had echoed Hoskinson’s warning.

Bitcoin investor Lark Davis also shared the news with his 1.5 million X followers, urging them to always do their own research and triple-check everything.

The channel itself does not show obvious signs of a scam broadcast yet, with its newest uploads still the same ones IOG posted a couple of weeks ago, including a Musashi Dojo update, a Leios explainer, and a Lace wallet interview with Nate Strang.

A Familiar Playbook For Crypto Users

Compromised social media accounts belonging to established crypto brands and leading personalities have become one of the more reliable scam formats around, mostly because an account with years of posting, uploading videos, and interacting with a huge follower or subscriber base often reads as trustworthy to anyone scrolling past it.

The bigger the following, the more convincing a fake post or livestream giveaway would become to someone who hasn’t clocked that the channel has changed hands, making it easier for them to be hit with phishing links that could drain funds from their wallets.

The alleged IOG incident has also come right when crypto is facing a major account and data security issue. As CryptoPotato reported recently, an attacker using a real government agency’s email domain convinced Revolut to hand over customer information, including passports, verification selfies, and complete Bitcoin transaction histories.

Later, a group calling itself Revolut Smilik started publishing the information while demanding 10,000 BTC to stop.

While the two incidents are not exactly the same, both show how much damage a convincing impersonation can do before anyone gets the chance to double-check.

The post Cardano Founder Warns IOG YouTube Channel Has Been Compromised appeared first on CryptoPotato.